Variability and effect sizes of intracranial current source density estimations during pain: Systematic review, experimental findings, and future perspectives

Juan Manuel Völker, Federico Gabriel Arguissain, Ole Kæseler Andersen, José Biurrun Manresa

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

4 Citations (Scopus)
30 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Pain arises from the integration of sensory and cognitive processes in the brain, resulting in specific patterns of neural oscillations that can be characterized by measuring electrical brain activity. Current source density (CSD) estimation from low-resolution brain electromagnetic tomography (LORETA) and its standardized (sLORETA) and exact (eLORETA) variants, is a common approach to identify the spatiotemporal dynamics of the brain sources in physiological and pathological pain-related conditions. However, there is no consensus on the magnitude and variability of clinically or experimentally relevant effects for CSD estimations. Here, we systematically examined reports of sample size calculations and effect size estimations in all studies that included the keywords pain, and LORETA, sLORETA, or eLORETA in Scopus and PubMed. We also assessed the reliability of LORETA CSD estimations during non-painful and painful conditions to estimate hypothetical sample sizes for future experiments using CSD estimations. We found that none of the studies included in the systematic review reported sample size calculations, and less than 20% reported measures of central tendency and dispersion, which are necessary to estimate effect sizes. Based on these data and our experimental results, we determined that sample sizes commonly used in pain studies using CSD estimations are suitable to detect medium and large effect sizes in crossover designs and only large effects in parallel designs. These results provide a comprehensive summary of the effect sizes observed using LORETA in pain research, and this information can be used by clinicians and researchers to improve settings and designs of future pain studies.

Original languageEnglish
JournalHuman Brain Mapping
Volume42
Issue number8
Pages (from-to)2461-2476
Number of pages16
ISSN1065-9471
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jun 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding information: Danmarks Grundforskningsfond, Grant/Award Number: DNRF121

Keywords

  • EEG
  • LORETA
  • source localization
  • test–retest reliability

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